{"author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr.","total_quotes":388,"quotes":[{"text":"One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["existentialism","humor","sarcastic-humor","satire"],"id":502,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."},{"text":"Fear hadn’t come to him yet. Pain hadn’t come where pain would come. There was only the feeling of having done something perfect at last—the taste of a drink from a cold, pure spring.","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["perfection"],"id":552,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."},{"text":"Anyway—because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["philosophy","reading"],"id":802,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."},{"text":"I became a so-called science fiction writer when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I'd offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology, and most fine American writers know nothing about technology. I got classified as a science fiction writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady, New York. My first book, Player Piano, was about Schenectady. There are huge factories in Schenectady and nothing else. I and my associates were engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place.","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["schenectady","science-fiction"],"id":3979,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."},{"text":"You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["recovery"],"id":8195,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."},{"text":"...We took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["futility","ignorance","permanence"],"id":10997,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."},{"text":"Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["beauty","depression","face","goddess","self-concept","shame"],"id":13369,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."},{"text":"I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["awareness","bloom","book","books","complete","finished","flowers","slaughterhouse-five","writing"],"id":13389,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."},{"text":"As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea.","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["adolf-von-kleist","mandarax","metaphor","symbolism"],"id":15140,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."},{"text":"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from the things she found in gift shops.","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["capitalism"],"id":16929,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":388,"pages":39,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}